A new African American-oriented television network has posted a video preview of its plans for an unprecedented five hours of daily news programming, which the network's primary creator, Edwin Avent, said he hopes to have on the air on Labor Day weekend.

Avent, former publisher of Heart & Soul magazine, told Journal-isms on Friday that as of this week, Soul of the South will be in 25 markets and that he hopes to reach 55 markets by year's end. The largest markets include Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta. The network will be broadcast-based, but will also be picked up by some cable networks.

The only journalist named in the video is Roy Hobbs, a veteran journalist and a former weekend television anchor in Birmingham, Ala., but the news director is said to be Tom Jacobs, a veteran broadcaster based in Cleveland. Matthew L. Mixon, a Los Angeles-based producer who has a background in sales, programming and production, is said to have a programming role.

The video promises a daily hourlong evening newscast, a two-hour morning news show, "Morning Call," and "Capital Eye," a nightly half-hour program "from each of our Southern capitals," based at WHUT-TV at Howard University.

Hobbs' involvement with the network represents a personal milestone. He was busted on drug charges in April 2010. Although he was never convicted, his name was splashed across local news media. "I was trying to commit suicide," Hobbs told Journal-isms later. Hobbs entered a recovery program and hoped he would not be blacklisted in the television industry.

"I haven't worked in two years," Hobbs said by telephone Friday. "I was mopping floors for $8 an hour with no benefits, just so I could buy food and keep the lights on. But my faith is strong, and I know that if I keep doing the right thing, the universe has a way of balancing things out.

"The great thing is, finally we can look out for ourselves," Hobbs said of the new network. "There's so much I can do for communities across the country because I have been there," he said. "I can give back.

"I'm thrilled that somebody looks at the needs of our community besides just entertainment. The local news doesn't do it. The national news doesn't. The cable news doesn't. The numbers of black reporters has shrunk. . . . It's sad that we haven't had the opportunities that other groups have had," mentioning networks that broadcast news to immigrants.

"When we look at the news director that we have, Tom Jacobs, we will put on a product that we not only can be proud of, but will show ourselves in a way that will help educate us, provide information for us. He will do what hasn't been done before."

"That's our job," Baquet said. "That's our primary job, to report things that should be part of the national discussion."

Calderone's story continued, "The controversy stems from two front-page Times stories last week.

"On May 29, reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote a 6,000-word piece delving into [President] Obama's hands-on role in counterterrorism operations, which was based on conversations with three dozen advisers and included details such as the existence of a set of 'baseball cards' containing information about suspected terrorists.

"Three days later, the paper ran a piece by David Sanger about how Obama had stepped up cyberattacks on Iran, an excerpt from his new book, 'Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.'

" 'I reject the notion that they were leaks,' Baquet said, arguing that 'leaks' come with 'the implication they were access journalism and someone in the White House called up and said, "Let me give you something that makes the president look good."

"[Baquet] said that Sanger's piece 'had been in the works for 18 months,' while the Shane/Becker piece was reported over several months."

Sanger echoed Baquet's position Friday on "The Diane Rehm Show" on Washington's WAMU-FM, which is transmitted to other NPR stations.

"Lawmakers of both parties held a news conference Thursday calling for legislation to restrict the flow of leaks," Perez reported.

"With The Times-Picayune set to reduce its print schedule to three days a week, The Lens took a look at readers' rituals on Monday and Tuesday, two of the days that the paper will drop sometime in the fall," Bevil Knapp wrote in the Lens, which describes itself as "the New Orleans area's first nonprofit, nonpartisan public-interest newsroom, dedicated to unique in-depth reporting projects, as well as exclusive daily stories."

"Photographer Bevil Knapp set out across the metro area this week and provides this photo essay of scenes that will soon be a thing of the past early in the week." The photo essay was titled, "A look at a disappearing daily ritual for many."

How does the online world stack up against traditional media in racial and gender diversity?

"One yearlong look at the home pages of popular sites Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Slate and Salon (Nieman Reports, Fall/11) described a dispiritingly familiar world in which African-Americans are usually celebrities or athletes, Latinos appear primarily in sporadic immigration stories, and Native Americans and Asian-Americans go missing," Janine Jackson reported for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Jackson questioned special sites dedicated to people of color. "Even done well, the 'special section' model invites questions. Are they places for those generally marginalized to speak authentically, without filter? Or do they unnaturally barricade perspectives, like the Women's Pages of old, with their implication that the rest of the paper, the 'real' news, concerns only men? . . .

"The answer might be that spaces created by and for people of color, or women, or any community can be a vital part of a healthy, varied media landscape, but are not a substitute for forums where these perspectives intersect and interact, as they do in life. . . . most people don't want to talk only to themselves, or to never be challenged. They do want to participate in arenas where they, and the issues they care about, are respected, not devalued or erased."

"When the Columbia Journalism Review recently asked about demographic diversity on op-ed pages for a late May article, I thought not only about op-ed pages, but about young writers on the Internet. The two need each other.

". . . It's sometimes said that news organizations had more of an opportunity to diversify when the economy was stronger and newspapers weren't competing with more modern technologies. These days, 'doing more with less' seems to be the rule.

"AOJ can do the next best thing, however: It can give the gift of editing.

". . . We might not be able to hire, but there are other ways to make our products more inclusive. Let's think about what we can do with freelancers.

"In Thursday's paper, the newspaper, which is a sponsor of this weekend's Puerto Rican Day Parade, published an ad promoting the parade that shows the New York Giants football player Victor Cruz smiling and standing underneath the Cuban flag.

" 'Talk about an oops. That is one big oops,' wrote the Web site Latino Rebels. 'We just called the newspaper and they told us that they will be printing a correction tomorrow, but that no statement has been issued.'

"A spokesman for The Daily News issued an apology by Thursday afternoon.

" 'As the presenting media sponsor, the Daily News apologizes to the Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latino communities as well as parade sponsors who were offended by our honest mistake,' the spokesman said. 'It will be rectified in tomorrow’s paper.' "

" 'I'm taking the fifth,' Smith says in the SportsCenter video above. 'I've been wrong this entire series. I have nothing to say, I plead the fifth. I don't know what they're going to do, I just know I'll be there.' "

The Sports Journalism Institute graduated its 20th class Friday in Columbia, Mo. A group of seven men and four women (seven African Americans, two Asian Americans and two Latinos) were in residence at the University of Missouri School of Journalism from June 1 to 9, after which students move on to internships around the country. They are placed at Associated Press Sports Editors member newspapers, ESPN.com, MLB.com and the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, 12 students, including 11 of color, were to graduate Saturday from the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute's 11-day Multimedia Scholars Program. Schools represented in the program at the John Seigenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University are Bennett, Grambling, Hampton, Howard, Louisiana Tech, Michigan State, North Carolina A&T, North Carolina Central, Northern Alabama, Northwest Missouri State and Xavier (La.). Eleven of the 12 are to intern for eight weeks at six newspapers owned by Schurz Communications Inc.

"A cartoon drawn by Rob Tornoe in Sunday's Sports section depicted Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee doing housework while a black/brown player with the word 'Offense' written on his T-shirt slept on a couch," Chris Murray, vice president-print of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists wrote to the Philadelphia Inquirer. "The Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists submits that this cartoon is racially insensitive. African American and Latino men are often stereotyped as being lazy and not wanting to work hard. The cartoon may suggest to readers that male athletes of color are lazy." (Larger cartoon image)

"One thing that became clear to me during the first part of my Knight Fellowship here at Stanford is that all the doom and gloom about the media industry really only applies to Western media and U.S. media in particular," Emad Mekay wrote on a new Web page devoted to essays by the Knight fellows. "Media in other parts of the world are still thriving and could even make major leaps later on." In the Mideast, "Individual journalists having a hard time getting jobs here could offer expertise as consultants or even as new hires for the expanding media empires in the Arab countries."